To ensure that we had the right people who will influence the solution and contribute to a productive sprint, the candidates include:

• Freshers and veterans at Honeywell who have struggled or are used to the intranet

• Intranet architects

• Enterprise products & service Reps

• A UX designer (myself)

• 130 employees across the globe to test the prototype on Day 5

Some of these candidates played more than one role. For example a couple of Enterprise service reps also played the role of Honeywell veterans. It's not ideal and could bias the outcome, but getting the exact match within a week's notice and conflicting schedules was difficult. In total we had 25 active participants.

As an addition to the workshop we were also required to summarize the findings, direction and next steps to the VP of Communications- Mike Bennet, Global Director External Communications & Brand - Susan Gross and VP of Engineering Krishna Mikkilineni. It was a project kicked off and later on approved directly by the Boardroom. 

Employees were looking for Travel, Leave, Approvals, Payslips, IT Support, etc., but couldn't find what they were looking for in the dump of links on each page or even through search. They usually asked others for a direct link that they bookmarked. Often going down a rabbit hole to find something...Logging into various services in a "Single Sign-on" environment. If you are a new hire - Good luck finding anything.

Service Admins & Support staff had to train and maintain multiple ticketing solutions that were an unnecessary cost. Unfortunately, most did not promote a Self Serve approach leading to a high number of tickets.

Communications want to keep employees informed of recent initiatives and news. But, unfortunately, employees weren't keen on this.

The Intranet did not work on mobile, so besides dedicated apps, the Corp BYOD program wasn't useful for most employees.

Problem Statement

The next step was to turn the issues into opportunities and sketch out ideas.

The team of 25 people broke up into five groups. The Facilitator and I rotated across teams to ensure ideas aren't ignored at this stage. I also helped the teams sketch out their ideas into something more understandable and legible.

Then I facilitated a Speedboat exercise to identify Desires & Constraints.

Desires

• Surface the most popular services contextually to the user. For example, if they are waiting for a Travel Approval or have to give approvals for team members, these would surface on the home page. 

• Provide some level of customization to bookmark/favorite specific pages.

• Elevate the burden on Support staff by automating simple issue resolutions, FAQs and providing step-by-step guidance. 

• The mobile experience also needs to cover essential services like support.

• Though Internal marketing communications was not desired by any participant it was not only a must have but required key real estate on the landing page. Employees did not know much about Honeywell's image in the eyes of the public and focused only in the own areas of expertise. Flooding our inboxes with emails so this was not an option anyone preferred.

Constraints

• Redesigning existing service pages would be an unrealistic proposal

• Bringing in an external service like Service Now at the time was out of the question.

• If the PoC were to be funded the project would be outsourced.

• The landing pg. will continue to remain on the default page of the browser.

• KPIs will be calculated based on clickthroughs and NPS only.

We sent out the prototype to the already selected 130 candidates across Honeywell. Responses poured in I made observed patterns and made adjustments primarily in terminology. 

By 8:30pm IST we had approval of the prototype and its features.

The Design Sprint was a success. 

The Digital Workplace Project was given the green light

The team overlooking the external agency's work informed me In the subsequent weeks that:

• the existing Sharepoint framework did not support the PoC's Search feature. 

• Service Now will be looked into to see how best it can support the Support feature in the PoC

• The external agency made no effort in categorizing the remaining links of the intranet. It was dumped in the Hamburger menu as an endless list.

• That said all the other features of contextual and actionable cards that can be customized by the user were still part of the scope.

Design Sprints are not meant to design or rethink ecosystems.
They are best used to make minor enhancement to a product or find a solution for an underserved use-case. I am certain that given the time for a deeper study we would have discovered many more problems and conclude with a better end to end solution.

My only regret is that I couldn't be there to guide the project once it was handed over to the external agency. They lost the essence and intent of the Design Principles & the Mobile First approach.